Calliope Calling
by Apalapucian
Summary: James wields a wand for the first time. Lily giggles, euphoric and carefree and on top of the world. Sirius stands up and slams the door to shut his younger brother out. Peter sighs and goes back down to his room to the sound of his mum calling. And Remus screams, raw and screeching and painfully young. (One-shot; Lily and the Marauders as children)


**A/N:** _A bit ambitious to write, this one. Written for Jily week; the prompt was childhood. If you've read this on Tumblr, I edited a few bits, so now it's a little less all over the place. Reviews keep the writing juju god close! Happy reading :-)_

* * *

It may be highly unlikely that stars just have to _align_ to make personal, staggering events happen for a specific somebody. Hearts may not be brought into this world connected to another with an invisible, unbreakable string. Some lives aren't really lived as long predestined halves of a whole. But every once in a while, on the map of plans made and plans unmade and messy timetables, unknown to no one but a probable higher entity lurking somewhere, souls may converge around something common. Voices carry through. Hands graze. And maybe, just maybe, some stories meld, way before they're even supposed to begin.

* * *

There's this fair only a few miles off Cokeworth—carousels and booths and circus and all, the biggest to be around this year—and they're packing up and moving tomorrow.

Tonight, the air smells like sweets and grass and smoke and a little bit of rust, calliope music floats through the air and rustles the leaves of the trees lining the clearing, and a little girl tumbles out of the black curtains of the horror house, face flushed and giggling. She turns around to face the makeshift building, puts her hands on her hips, and waits. She has shocking red hair, the greenest of eyes, but not the best of dresses. She grins when her daddy comes out, though, and when he meets her eyes with his dazed stare, she breaks out into crisp peals of laughter once more. He shakes his head and laughs with her. She takes his hand and skips her way to the nearby candy floss stand.

"Nice dress, kid," the vendor comments as Mr. Evans hands him the money. He doesn't look at all like he finds it nice. Maybe blue is not his favorite color. Or maybe he's just particularly affronted by the protruding, bright orange cat stitched on the front of Lily's frock.

Either way little Lily Evans smiles, takes her sweet, and says, "Thank you, mister. My daddy bought it for Tuney—my sister, you see—but she didn't like it." She looks down and tugs at the hem for the vendor to inspect further, should he want to, and shrugs. "I don't see a problem with it. It's plenty cozy."

This makes her father chuckle.

It wouldn't be the last time someone comes up to them and talks to Lily or her dad about the dress, but there's this one man who would later stand out among them. He's really old, with spectacles and a funny pointed hat speckled with shiny stars, and his laugh sounds way more genuine than the rest. "That's a wicked dress you have there," he says, and he's amused, truly and greatly, by Lily's smile and dress and hair and spark. He bends down to ruffle her scarlet locks, and Lily reckons she likes him best.

Mr. Evans nods at the man and smiles.

"Are you from around here?" Lily asks. She stares unabashedly at the hat, fascinated.

"Oh, no," the stranger replies. "Far from here. I have a boy the same age as you are."

"I'm eight."

"Mhmm, that's right. He's eight, too."

"Is he here?"

"He's… yes, he's around here somewhere. He tends to run around a lot."

"Oh."

"He probably went back to that coaster thing."

"The roller coaster?" asks Lily. She looks up at her dad with narrowed eyes, and then looks back at the man. "Daddy wouldn't let me go. He says it's dangerous."

"It _is _dangerous," says the stranger. "Looks deadly, that thing."

Lily's bottom lip juts out for a second. "Is the Ferris wheel dangerous, too?"

"That's the big turning wheel, yes?"

Lily looks bemused. "Yes…"

"Well…"

"She wants to see the fireworks display from up there," Mr. Evans explains. "I told her it's going to be the same watching it from here."

The old man nods. (He's heard that there will be no fireworks show tonight, but he doesn't tell anyone that.) "Do you like fireworks very much?"

"_Yes._"

"Then I think the Ferris wheel would be a good idea."

Mr. Evans shakes his head and rolls his eyes (a habit Lily would later inherit), but is nevertheless chuckling.

"I should be off looking for that tyke then," the man says.

"Alright."

He tips his hat towards Mr. Evans, who in turn tells him to "have a good night, sir".

Before he disappears in the crowd, he turns around and calls out to Lily: "He would really love your dress, though!"

* * *

When he was six, Peter Pettigrew thought that if (only) he would, he could climb up to the roof through the bigger rocks lining up the wall beside his bedroom window. It took him a year of speculating to finally try. Another one for him to go all the way up and succeed.

Tonight, he manages to bring a blanket with him—the maroon one, too small for him now, tattered and frayed from old age—and even a tumbler of hot chocolate from the kitchen. He sits in silence on the cold tiled roof, tumbler in his hands, the wind ruffling his hair, eyebrows furrowed. Not very far ahead, a clump of lights stands out from the lattice of street lamps and house fluorescents. He stares at it intently. He likes to imagine he can hear the calliope music all the way here, likes to think he can smell candy floss and hear the creaking of the Ferris wheel as it turns.

He wanted to go, he wanted to so much, but his mother said she needed help getting dinner ready and his father said he didn't have anyone to go with anyway.

Now he sits and insists to himself that his eyes are prickling only because of the drafty breeze. He's going to go to Hogwarts soon enough, he thinks (wiping his face idly with the old, scant piece of fabric), and then he's going to have friends who would go to carnivals with him.

It will take him three years to finally find them. (Another ten to lose them all.)

* * *

"Don't do it."

Sirius Black flinches and whips around, his hand hovering over the knob and his oversized robes falling off one shoulder. "What are you _doing _here?" he hisses at his younger brother, who looks positively unsure of what he is, in fact, doing.

"Don't go!" Regulus whispers back, only a few inches shorter, daring a step forward. "They'll _know_."

"They won't if you shut up about it."

Regulus pulls a face. "Why do you even want to go? It's a muggle f—"

"Why do you care?" Sirius regrets it almost immediately after he said it.

"I'm your brother."

Sirius sighs and drops his hand. He faces Regulus, his face grimacing in deliberation. After a moment of silence, he lights up. "Do you want to come?"

Surprise flashes through Regulus's features, but it vanishes as quickly as it appears. "_No_."

"Why not?" asks Sirius. He's excited now, and Regulus cringes minutely when Sirius puts a hand on his shoulder. "It's going to be fun! They have rides! Things move without magic, there are people who tame lions—_lions_, Reg!—and card tricks and dancers _on fire_…"

Regulus eyes him warily, his gaze shifting fleetingly from the door to his brother to the ceiling, beyond which their parents are sleeping, or so the boys think. Sirius doesn't understand what he's still deciding on—he's been set on going ever since that half-blood git in the restaurant spoke of it so loudly to his peers.

"I can't," Regulus says at length. Sirius's face falls.

"Fine. Go back to your room then."

"I'm not letting you go either!"

"I can do whatever I want!"

"It's—it's _wrong_, Sirius! It's just—mother and father say it's wrong, they're _wrong _people, and we mustn't—"

"None of them have ever done me any harm! And alright, I wouldn't talk to anyone, I just want to see—"

"Yes, Sirius, please do tell," a cold, female voice interrupts from the other end of the vestibule. A chill runs through the elder Black brother, and Regulus pales considerably. "What _do_ you want to see?"

Sirius doesn't meet anyone's eye. His hand drops from his brother's shoulder. He straightens up, however, and he doesn't move away from the door.

"Very well," says Walburga Black when it's apparent that Sirius isn't going to answer. She walks over to them, her footsteps loud and precise and ominous. "Regulus?"

The young boy is quiet. He opens his mouth, but his lips only quiver.

"Tell me, boy."

"_Reg_…" Sirius pleads.

Regulus looks down and clenches his tiny, shaking hands. "He… Sirius, he, erm… he wanted to go to that muggle carnival."

* * *

"Can you hear that?"

"Can I hear what?"

"The music! It's… can you hear it?"

Mrs. Lupin folds the last of the face towels and tilts her head to one side. She shakes her head. "I don't hear anything, dear."

"Oh," says Remus Lupin. He thinks it's only the moon, and his _situation, _and he's doing _it _again (and soon after he'll be doing more... but no, don't, there are a few hours—minutes?—left not to think about _that _yet). His mum seems to realize this too, he can tell by the way her hands twitch and her back stiffens. He looks up at her from under his lashes and fiddles with his hands.

She smiles kindly at him, though, and he returns it, albeit weaker. "Can I go?" he asks. "That's a carnival, yeah? Can I go tomorrow? Or… after? Day after that?"

"I think it's their last night tonight."

"Oh." He smiles again to appease her because she looks truly concerned about it, but it gets less convincing by the minute. "That's alright. I'll just go… some other time."

Mrs. Lupin presses a kiss on his temple and pulls him into a tight embrace. She smells like firewood and roses and mushroom soup. Remus holds on to that, and to her, for as long as he can, but everything seems to go fast and blurry when it's _this_ kind of night.

"I'll be back in the morning."

"Okay."

Mrs. Lupin is halfway out the door when he calls for her, and he grips the metal frame of the bed tight to manage one last smile. "It'll be over soon, yeah? I've served enough months? It'll be gone soon?"

There's a pause wherein a multitude of expressions crosses Mrs. Lupin's face, majority of which not very reassuring, but not long after she smiles through tearful eyes and says, "Soon."

* * *

A crack resonates through the night, and an old man with a funny hat walks through the grove of trees. He looks behind him and makes sure a little boy of eight is following; he smiles at his struggle to avoid the thorny bushes while tending to his ice cream cone. It's much more quiet here. The music is faint, and the thousand conversations not far below are muffled.

He sits on a particularly big rock and motions for the boy to sit beside him. The kid finishes his ice cream and sits (he wipes his fingers on his shirt), and they both watch the carnival from up the cliff.

"Tell me again?" James Potter asks, adjusting his glasses with his grimy hands.

"Bright blue with a cat on the front. Orange and stuffed."

"What was her name then?"

Mr. Potter blinks at him. "Oh… well, I didn't think to ask."

"Blimey, Dad."

Mr. Potter laughs. He takes out his telescope and hums as he looks through them.

"What are you looking at?"

"The Ferris wheel."

"But I can see the Ferris wheel from here."

"Your man's getting old, kid. But let's see… alright, when you see a flash of red on the top cart, you tell me, yeah?"

"Why?"

"Because we're doing magic tonight."

James actually stands up and grips tufts of unruly hair in his hands. "Are we _really_?"

"You want to have a go with my wand?"

He's practically jumping. "Dad!"

It warms his heart. "_James_."

"I can use magic? With your_ wand_?"

"Yes."

James sucks in a deep breath to contain his massive excitement. Eventually he sits back down, but he can't stay still. He taps the rock, shifts his weight, adjusts his glasses. He watches the Ferris wheel with a big grin and tingling hands.

"What do I do?" he asks, narrowing his eyes to make sure he doesn't miss the 'flash of red'.

Mr. Potter puts the telescope down and fishes out his wand. He presents it to James, who stares at it in reverence. "You give that little girl the show of her life."

Little James pauses in his ecstatic disposition to note that, "You like her very much."

"She was very likable. She reminded me of you."

"Was she good-looking?"

He's amused, but he pretends to think on it. "Hmm, I liked her dress."

"Okay," James mutters, too distracted with the object in his hand to properly pay attention. He's not doing anything with it like his father expected him to. He's just holding it very tight, the wand stiff and poised, as if he's afraid he's going to drop it or break it.

Mr. Potter teaches him a few tricks and the most basic of spells, holds his little hand in his bigger, wrinkly fingers. He halfheartedly scolds him when he notices his grazed knee, probably from running around to cut the roller coaster line, but James smiles up at him mischievously, and he's missing a tooth, and there's a chocolate smudge on his nose, and it's just _impossible_, bloody impossible, to get mad at him, his mother would say so too, so he throws an arm around his shoulders, draws him close, and mutters as he rumples his hair much like he did the girl earlier: "You ruddy little tyke..."

Later, a little before Mr. Potter himself sees that precious redhead with her father again, James nudges his father's arm. "Hey, Dad," he says.

Mr. Potter finds him looking rather thoughtful, gazing at the fair, the lights from the distance dancing on the surface of his glasses. "Hm?"

"I want a new jumper."

Mr. Potter's eyebrows shoot up. "Alright…?"

"But it's got to have a stuffed stag on the front."

* * *

Right here, now, everyone you see has a different story. That old man over there never expected a child anymore, but look, here he is with a wild, laughing kid, chocolate stains on his collar and a scrape on his knee, eight years old and all theirs and more alive than he or she ever dreamed he would be. That other man on the top capsule of the Ferris wheel; he fell in love here for the first time. Her little redhead princess has the same eyes, the same spirit, as her queen. Somewhere out there, on that hill in the west the girl points at just seconds before the skies light up, a boy gazes wistfully at the horizon. Another, although in a hidden house far away, thinks of this place and of Ferris wheels and of darts and balloons, as he buries his head in his pillow and tries very hard not to cry. The last one stares at the ceiling and pretends he doesn't hear his mum sobbing in the living room. He can still hear the calliope music, and he wonders what life must be like from wherever it comes from.

Names and scribbled dates and passing seconds get lost in the ever moving, intricate design that is life, and it may take an awful lot of time for two people to find each other.

But for now, here we are. Because sometimes, like in the next minute when Lily reaches the top of the wheel, and James _finally _sees the flash of red, in the next minute when the clouds part and moonlight spills—

* * *

James wields a wand for the first time, his sloppy work earning a proud whoop from his father anyway;  
Lily giggles, euphoric and carefree and on top of the world, her hand reaching out to lace her fingers with her dad's, the other tracing the _impossible _dancing deer in the sky;  
Sirius stands up to slam the door with welted, stinging hands to shut his younger brother's pleading apologies;  
Peter sighs and goes back down to his room to the sound of his mum calling;  
and Remus screams, raw and screeching and painfully _young_, all thoughts of calliope and sweets dissipating as hot white pain shoots through his limbs and finds home in his veins;

* * *

—for once, even if only for one, short, insignificant minute, fate (or an unsuspecting ringmaster, you choose) weaves together five of what could be the most colorful stories of this generation, way before they even begin.


End file.
